JN 6 is fairly hard going if we're to take it at more than surface level, but it's encouraging that Jesus says what he says in the synagogue. While the first to acknowledge we have to find the right approach to say & teach them, 'hard sayings' are still on the agenda! Not just for a select group, but for all who come to hear God's Word preached publicly & meaningfully.

Hearing what Jesus says about himself & God & us all being alive is a wake up call to all of us who practise dead religion, belong to dead congregations or dead denominations. Why put up with any of that, supposedly in the cause of a/the Living God?!

The recipe for change is not, thank God, of the fast food, fast fix variety. The foodie revival of the appreciation of 'slow' food lends itself to Jesus' imagery of himself as 'food & drink'. Sufficiently so to stir a revival of our experiencing, savouring God as FOOD for taking long & seriously. Viaticum not for the dying but those living & journeying? Journeying into God needs, in the context of this passage, to be balanced with God journeying into us, & our coming alive in consequence, as God dwells not externally to us so much as internally. We're always being told we need to 'internalise' understandings these days; why not internalise God so far as we can do that, humanly speaking?

In the small parish where I take a turn at preaching, I sometimes get a bit of stick from a small band of conservatives who see me as 'far too liberal'. I quite enjoy giving them a bit of stick back! Naughty of me, I know, but love them as I may, they seem to me to be too lazy to wrestle with what the disciples here call a 'hard saying'. The faith the people I mean seem to hold (whether they actually practise it this way I'm not so sure) is to prefer Godly thunder & lightning over Godly love & compassion. A few get there own back by playing the wag when I'm preaching! What interests me is that this little band seems to find the Jesus face of God too hard compared with the 'Moses' (say) face. They feed on one God, I on another. Or so it seems.

Jesus' 'there are some of you who don't believe' raises another issue for church life today. In my experience, most people believe in God, or want to, in some sense, even if their understanding of God seems to more sophisticated old me as inadequate. But what blurs our mission & ministry more & more is that people have given up believing in the church(es)! Aren't those of us who number ourselves among Jesus' friends 'feeding' on God enough for God's own life to be recognizable in us? Not for God to be recognizable enough 'out there somewhere', but in us? Here, where we live among them as God lives among us all - in us. To fail to live God like this is to play the traitor every bit as much as that fellow called Judas.

Some will not like what I/we am/are preaching if we say this kind of thing. Some will draw back & no longer walk with us. That is always hurtful. Mustn't Jesus have been terribly disappointed at this turn of events? But if this happens to us too, let it not be because we're 'hard-liners' but because we take the harder Jesus path of love & compassion.